Night. I wandered on, past the cramped, dark recesses in the walls where men sat playing draughts, having their hair cut and flapping at flies, and thought again of Oscar and André on that corner late at night a century or more before me … Oscar’s large, white hand on André’s shoulder, the whispered invitation, the booming English laughter, and then the clatter of wheels on paving stones as their fiacre wound down the hill towards the gas-lit boulevards below – and sin.That corner was probably just a stone’s throw from where I was loitering in the sun in the rue Sidi Driss Hamidouche.The casbah of Algiers is quite small, after all, just an eyrie above the bay, a tight tangle of grubby streets and steps jammed between ancient walls on a sharp ridge, knifing up from the port.They’d just left a nearby café where, squatting with cups of mint tea on a mat-covered platform, half asleep in the fire-lit darkness, they’d been joined by a slender young man, scarcely more than a boy, wearing those white, ballooning breeches you now see only in paintings. Olive-skinned, with the languid eyes of a hashish-smoker, Mohammed, as he was called, sat down cross-legged on a stool below them and began to play quietly on a reed flute.The café fell silent. Soon the boy who’d served them their tea, the caouadji, came over and sat beside Mohammed, accompanying him softly on his goblet drum. It must have sounded like clear water trickling over sharp stones. And André’s eyes lingered on the flute-player’s supple fingers and slim, burnished legs. A Greek goatherd playing his flute.Time had evaporated. He was nowhere and everywhere, he was in a trance … he had forgotten who he was, until Oscar took him by the arm, jerking him back into the present.They went outside. And at the next corner, laying his pale, pudgy hand on his young companion’s shoulder, apropos of nothing that had been said in the café that night, or in any other café anywhere else, for that matter, not even in Paris, where they’d met for many intense tête-à-têtes – apropos of nothing at all, Oscar Wilde whispered those startling six words. And after half a lifetime of saying ‘ non’, André said ‘oui’. Yet what was so memorable about this episode? Why dwell for even a moment on a callow young Frenchman and an Irishman with bad teeth picking up boys together in Algiers one night in 1895? Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even André’s first time – not quite, although, admittedly, the other two times, in Tunisia and on Lake Como, hadn’t unlocked anything in him. They’d dangled a key, perhaps, but never inserted it in any lock. Certainly nothing had come tumbling out. As I made my way back down the hill towards the arcaded streets of the modern town, squashed between the bay and a wall of hills, I asked myself why it was this shadowy scene that I’d so vividly recalled on my walk through the casbah instead of … well, something of more consequence: the arrival of the first Roman legions, for instance, or the first wave of Vandals, or that marvellous moment in 1829 when the Dey of Algiers struck the French consul three times across the face with his peacock- feather fly-whisk, calling him a ‘wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal’ (which he was), thereby provoking the French to occupy Algeria. Or, if it had to be an erotic moment, why not some celebrated love affair, something tragic and tumultuous, conducted beneath carved cedar ceilings picked out in gold and painted in ver milion? When all was said and done, this was Dido and Aeneas territory. (Well, not quite, that was next door in Tunisia, but almost.) Why not something epic, something extraordinary, rather than this unremarkable encounter? Even what happened next in the rooms Oscar had rented somewhere down by the water (Oscar in the back room with the drummer, André in the front room with the flute-player) is common enough – practically clichéd. André’s ‘shuddering jubilation’ and so forth, all that overheated business about ‘what name shall I give the bliss I felt to be holding tightly in my naked arms that perfect little body, wild, fervent, lascivious and saturnine’ – well, some version of all that has happened to almost everyone, surely. And as for André’s soul and body being so light all the next day that he almost blew away – it’s disarming, and stirs memories, but it’s hardly momentous. It was, it’s true, a quintessentially modern moment.That is to say, it was above all André’s psyche rather than his body that went adventuring that night in the casbah: he was exploring his own mind’s labyrinths rather than the casbah’s.This was an act of pure self- discovery, not a heroic quest to find the Northwest Passage or the source of the Nile; this was merely dallying with danger rather than a swashbuckling fight to the death with monsters or marauding natives. Dispiritingly, this sort of adventure is the only sort left to most of us now that there’s virtually nowhere left for us to go – nowhere wildly unfamiliar – and absolutely nothing left to do when we get there except photograph it. No wonder it was Oscar Wilde who triggered it in André’s case: he was so modern that he’s still modern a century after he died. As André told his mother just two days before going to the casbah with him,Wilde was nothing less than ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation’. Arabesques: A tale of double lives by Robert Dessaix (pictured left) is published by Picador, rrp $49.99. OCTOBER 2008 ı goodreading 51